Archive for October 23rd, 2009

Where Have All the Ramparts Gone? Peter Richardson’s new book about the groundbreaking Ramparts magazine says the rag changed America. Truthdig arts and culture editor Kasia Anderson asks the author and former Ramparts Editor Robert Scheer, Truthdig’s editor-in-chief, why the magazine’s impact isn’t better remembered and what will take its place. READ THE WHOLE ITEM

Peter Richardson’s new book about the groundbreaking Ramparts magazine says the rag changed America. Truthdig arts and culture editor Kasia Anderson asks the author and former Ramparts Editor Robert Scheer, Truthdig’s editor-in-chief, why the magazine’s impact isn’t better remembered and what will take its place.

Fox News hosts and contributors are now asserting that the White House’s criticism of Fox News is a diversion or a trick to direct attention away from the administration’s policies, particularly health care reform. Glenn Beck has referred to the criticism as a “gold coin” used in a magic trick, while Newt Gingrich claimed the White House is trying to keep the media “focused on trivia.”

Fox News: Criticism of Fox is a “distraction,” a “shiny penny,” “trivia,” and a “magic” trick

Glenn Beck says Obama “is absolutely a magician,” uses “gold coin” tricks to distract. On his Fox News show, Beck said, “You know, I have told you a million times, the guy is David Copperfield. He just keep falling for it over and over again. … The guy is a magician.” Then, pulling out a gold coin and purporting to do a magic trick, Beck said: “They need to distract us long enough. Use that misdirection, because, see, once they pull up and you turn on the lights and you’re like, wow, that was amazing with that coin, you see, what has changed here? What has — oh, my gosh! Oh, yeah. Health care has magically appeared. All while you were watching the stupid little coin. You know what? They believe if they can get you to watch the coin, if they can get you to have you watch me and Fox, well, then, they can slip this by and get it passed.” [Glenn Beck, 10/21/09]

Karl Rove: Beck’s gold coin trick was a “pretty good way to illustrate an important point.” On his Twitter account, Rove responded to musician Joelon Wilson’s assertion that Beck’s coin trick was “right on” by writing that “[i]t was pretty good way to illustrate an important point.” From Rove’s Twitter feed: “Re: Coin trick on Beck. @futureicon It was pretty good way to illustrate an important point.”

After Hannity guest says Fox fight is a “shiny penny,” Hannity agrees that it’s a “distraction.” On Hannity, after Jeri Thompson, wife of former Republican presidential candidate Fred Thompson, compared “the distraction on what they are doing exactly right now with this intimidation and the Fox tour,” to a “shiny penny,” Hannity said: “Let me see if I can sum this up. Is it that they want to distract from the debates that they’re losing, the American public overwhelmingly, according to every credible poll is against Obamacare. Are they trying to distract, and are they trying to intimidate? You know, what’s the strategy?” [Hannity, 10/21/09]

Newt Gingrich: White House trying to keep media “focused on trivia.” On The O’Reilly Factor, Fox News contributor Newt Gingrich said the Obama administration is trying to “distract the country” from problems by having a “fight” with Fox News. Gingrich said: “If your choice is — imagine you’re Rahm Emanuel. And he’s like, OK, now tomorrow I can have unemployment rising or a fight with Fox News. And next week, I can have health care too expensive or a fight with Rush Limbaugh. And I think they have a deliberate policy of trying to find a way to keep the news media focused on trivia in order to not deal with the real issues because the real issues are all going bad for them right now.” [The O’Reilly Factor, 10/21/09]

Beck compared Fox News to Jews during the Holocaust, other news organizations to silent bystanders. On his October 13 radio show, Beck said: “When they’re done with Fox, and you decide to speak out on something. The old, ‘First they came for the Jews, and I wasn’t Jewish.’ When you have a question, and you believe that something should be asked, they’re a — totally fine with you right now; they have no problem with you. When they’re done with Fox and talk radio, do you really think they’re going to leave you alone if you want to ask a tough question? Do you really think that a man who has never had to stand against tough questions and has as much power as he does — do you really believe after he takes out the number one news network, do you really think that this man is then not going to turn on you? That you and your little organization is going to cause him any hesitation at all not to take you out?” [Premiere Radio Networks’ The Glenn Beck Program, 10/13/09]

Rove: “[T]hey’re going to come hard at you, and they’re going to cut your legs off.” On the October 18 edition of Fox News Sunday, Fox News contributor Karl Rove said: “[T]his is an administration that’s getting very arrogant and slippery in its dealings with people. And if you dare to oppose them, they’re going to come hard at you, and they’re going to cut your legs off. … Fox is asking tough questions. Fox has got on the opinion side of it some very tough critics of the administration. They’re conflating the news side and the opinion side in order to — in order to attack a media outlet. Again, it’s undignified for the president of the United States to be doing.” Later, Rove said that “it is demeaning the office of the president by taking the president and moving him from a person who ought to be talking to everybody and communicating through every available channel to saying, ‘If you oppose me, if you question me, if you’re too tough on me, by gosh, me and my people are not going to — are not going to come on. We’re going to penalize you.’ And that just is wrong, fundamentally wrong.” [Fox News Sunday, 10/18/09]

Fox News hosts suggest they’re on an “enemies list.” Fox News personalities joined other conservative media figures in fearmongering that the White House has an “enemies list” and that Fox News is — in Beck’s words — “another enemy” that “warmongers” in the Obama administration would fight with “missiles pointed right at Fox.” Hannity claimed the White House is “promising retribution.” Media figures previously baselessly suggested that people who reportedly claimed to have received unsolicited email from Obama adviser David Axelrod may have been added to a White House “enemies list” after emails they sent that were critical of the Obama administration were purportedly forwarded to flag@whitehouse.gov.

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Darth Cheney punked out by Gen. Eaton Excerpt: Obama has a new ally in the war of words that Dick Cheney started after leaving his coffin and running his mouth once again in a speech to the Center for Security Policy. His name is Gen. Paul Eaton (Ret.), who served more than 30 years in the United States Army from 2003-2004 and oversaw the […]

Palin Endorses Hoffman in NY-23 Sarah Palin’s “decision to endorse the Conservative party candidate over the Republican nominee in a special House election in upstate New York is the latest example that the former Alaska governor’s allegiance is to her conservative principles rather than the edicts of the party,” the Washington Post reports.

“Palin is the most high profile national Republican to endorse Doug Hoffman over state Assemblywoman Dede Scozzafava in the upcoming Nov. 3 special election for the seat vacated by Secretary of the Army John McHugh in a race that has rapidly developed into a battle for control of the direction of the national party.”

Interestingly, The Hill reports Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty (R) — who may face Palin in a primary if they both run for president in 2012 — refused to back either Scozzafava when asked last night.

Said Pawlenty: “I haven’t studied the race at all. It’s not that I would or wouldn’t [endorse Scozzafava], I just don’t know anything about it.”

Does Citigroup Need China? Most of the economists and pundits who could not see an $8 trillion housing bubble are telling us that the United States desperately needs for the Chinese government to keep buying its debt. This crew of failed analysts argues that…

Jeffrey Goldberg’s Absurdly Cheap Shot I am just about to board a plane for the US, so I am unable to answer this remarkably ill-informed (and, under the circumstances, vicious) shot from Jefferey Goldberg: the idea that he cannot go to the J Street conference…

Soon after White House communications director Anita Dunn called out Fox News for being the “communications arm of the Republican Party,” Fox News senior vice president Michael Clemente said that “[i]t’s astounding the White House cannot distinguish between news and opinion programming.” But a subsequent Media Matters item demonstrated just how much Fox’s “news” mirrors its right-wing opinion. Now, a new Media Matters video documents the fact that Fox News “declared ‘war’ on the White House long before Dunn’s comments.” Watch it:

Democrats on House committee lock out Republicans The House of Representatives, ever the rowdier and more populist of the two chambers of Congress, has been the scene of incessant partisan warfare in 2009, as each party appears to be in a near-constant state of outrage over the behavior of the other.

Government widens control over paychecks The Federal Reserve joined the Treasury Department on Thursday in imposing new limits on executive pay, extending the government’s control over compensation at taxpayer-owned companies to institutions that are merely government regulated.

EPA move to cut Great Lakes ship emissions stirs the waters DULUTH, MINN. — A horn blasts, seagulls screech and tourists clap as the longest ship in the Great Lakes, the 308-meter Paul R. Tregurtha, glides through Duluth’s canal and heads into Lake Superior, loaded down with coal bound for Midwestern power plants.

For Kerry, a growing prominence on foreign policy stage Five years after his painful loss to George W. Bush, ending a presidential campaign in which he was accused of being an Iraq war defeatist who was too willing to talk to America’s adversaries, Sen. John F. Kerry has finally found his place in the foreign policy spotlight.

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The Hollywood Liberal started in 2004 at the height of the Bush Administration madness in America.
We were inspired by the late great Bartcop.com. The very first thing I did when the site started was to get arrested at the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York. My arrest at the start of a march from The World Trade Center was later ruled unconstitutional by a federal judge. On New Years Eve 2014 the case was finally settled, with a judge awarding a class action suit that I was part of over $26 Million. I posted daily on the blog up until the end of The Bush error, and the site is now run as a history of the whole fiasco. Feel free to browse the old postings, pictures, & comics (an HL favorite) It reveals the twisted history of the times. Thanks H.L.